THE

LIBERTARIAN

ENTERPRISE

What, Me Radical?

I recently gave a copy of my new book Lever Action to one of my
daughter's skating friends, a pretty, fascinatingly bright 16-year-old
being raised as a genuine Algore-voting, wine-and-cheese-gobbling,
Volvo-driving, heartbleeding, bedwetting socialist ... er, liberal.

We've had a couple of political knockdown-dragouts in the time I've
known her. (Her mother's amiably combative, too.) She can be
out-argued. I'm three times her age, twice her size, and have been
butting heads this way since the Kennedy Administration. But she will
not be intimidated out of the position she defends so nobly (having
been indoctrinated into it by her parents and the public school system
they adore). Her poise and courage are admirable. The only time I ever
threw her off is when I told her (unfairly but incontrovertibly) that
she'll find herself agreeing with me in another 10 years.

Lever Action is my only nonfiction book, so far, a collection of
articles and speeches I've written over the past 20 years when I was
supposed to be writing novels. My daughter's friend was delighted with
the gift. The next time I saw her, she reported that she'd taken it to
school where one of her teachers read part of one essay to the
class -- and immediately proclaimed me to be ... a "radical".

A "radical"?

Me?

Of course I've been proud to wear the label since I was about my
little friend's age, follower of Rand that I was, one of Heinlein's
children. But it got me thinking about what I mean by "radical" and
what other people seem to mean. No doubt to the teacher, I'm what my
grandmother used to mean whenever she called me a "communist".

I was a full-fledged Randite at that point in my life, highly annoying
to others, writing a highly annoying column for the highly annoying
campus paper during the highly annoying Goldwater-Johnson campaign. My
grandmother had all the political acumen of a tub of Mazola oil. What
she meant by "radical" was someone who is not only unorthodox (and
highly annoying), but ill-mannered enough to be that way in public,
embarrassing her in front of her bridge club.

Since then, I've been accused of being "radical", in that same way, by
those who claim to be what I've been all along: libertarian. What they
mean, I think, is that I'm inconveniently principled. I insist on
stepping forward for what I believe (and what they claim to believe,
as well, when it isn't costing them anything) no matter how hard it
gets, no matter what I stand to lose by refusing to fudge just a
little, no matter how silly I make myself (or them) look.

I've lost plenty, and I've written about it, so I'm not going to
repeat myself here. Needless to say, I don't have a huge gaggle of
right-wing, anti-abortion, Lincoln-worshipping sugar daddies I have to
mollify by trimming the edges of my convictions. I'm accustomed to
looking silly. I must have looked silly to my Soviet affairs expert
editor at Random House when I predicted, based on what investment guys
call "fundamentals", the collapse of the USSR a decade before it
happened. I know I looked silly when I predicted that Y2K would amount
to nothing. I'm accustomed to looking silly -- and being proven right.

Let me tell you what my "radicalism" looks like to me, from the
inside. But instead of using it (as I've been trying for the last 40
years, to fix a broken civilization), let's limit ourselves to dealing
with a flat tire.

"Flat?" is the first thing you'll hear moderates, gradualists,
crybabies, and general-purpose nitpickers (MGGNs) whimper. "How can
you say it's flat? Isn't that unduly harsh? Won't you just turn people
off, talking like that? Isn't it really only flat on the bottom?"

Obviously you can't begin to fix a problem until you identify it
correctly. Is that "radical"? Or is it simply the minimum performance
acceptable under the circumstances, regardless of how others see it?

Next, you must open up the trunk and get out the jack, the
jack-handle, and a tire-iron.

"But wait!" scream the MGGNs again. "Don't you see what you're
committing yourself to, opening that trunk? What will people think
about the cold, unbending tools you're threatening that poor, innocent
tire with? Where's the love in that tire iron? Where's the warmth in
that jack? Can't we use kinder, gentler tools? You're going to get
your hands dirty -- and make us look bad doing it!"

All of this is noise, of course, and irrelevant. Either you change the
tire and get rolling again, or you sit on the shoulder bandying words
with Nerf-brained droolers until the county repaves the road over you.
Guess which choice most of the libertarian movement has made for 30
years.

"Be realistic -- we have to compromise!"

By jacking the car only halfway up? By removing only three of the lug
nuts? To switch metaphors for a moment, by having the surgeon only
remove half the cancer? Otherwise, you might look arrogant, mightn't
you? You might look intransigent. You might get well.

"Can't we leave the old wheel on, for the sake of tradition?"

If at this point, you don't utter the magic words, "Blow me," or
something like them, you're a better man than I am. But you're still a
"radical" if you insist on looking past all the hot air and free
advice and understand that the tire has to be changed. It's a simple,
mechanical necessity.

Likewise, to me, what others call "radical" is simple, mechanical
necessity. If our country is a police state, there's no future in
euphemizing it. If a law is unconstitutional, the baboons who passed
and enforce it are criminals who belong in jail. If Republicans and
Democrats spout crap, it's crap. If our own leaders are cheap crooks,
they've got to be pitched out on their ears. If that's impossible,
somebody has to get in their way.

Simple, mechanical necessity. If you can't be a howitzer, be a
hemorrhoid.

Simple, mechanical necessity. If some MGGN denounces you as an
"extremist", rest assured it's because he doesn't believe in anything
himself. If an MGGN dismisses your ideas as "simplistic", it's because
he hasn't any of his own. (My wife points out that if you make a
problem complicated enough, you can't be blamed for not solving it, or
even trying.) The world is full of MGGNs who have ideological gangrene
and lack the guts to tell the doctor, "Go ahead and amputate."

Simple mechanical necessity declares that if you have principles you
want others to follow, then you'd damn well better express them
unambiguously and follow them yourself. That's all I've ever done.
It's all I'll ever do. And I guess that's what makes me a "radical".

How about you?

Right-wing myth to one side, "republic" and "democracy" mean the same
thing, one in Latin, the other in Greek. The thing to remember is that
they're both just another form of collectivism, of socialism, under
which your neighbors may vote you into the poorhouse -- or the
grave -- if they want what you have. Those who profess to care about
their nation and its place in history must expend every effort to
limit this possibility or to eliminate it altogether.
-- Alexander Hope, Looking ForwardFrom Hope, by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith
Mazel Freedom Press (forthcoming)

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